


like you never had wings

by orphan_account



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Body Horror, Comes Back Wrong, Crueltide, Gore, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Introspection, Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-09 21:31:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8912785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She thought the pain would stop after she was dead.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ViolentFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolentFlowers/gifts).



She thought the pain would stop after she was dead.

And she was dead. She had to be dead. The creature—the _thing—_ had left her here, on the cold ground. The fact that she was dead made the fear fade, a little. Before, the terror had been so thick that she could barely swallow, barely move. She’d never been paralyzed by fear before, torn between catatonic shock and that mindless animal need to fight, to flee, to get away.

But she couldn’t get away. And now she was dead.

She was trapped here, in this nightmare world. No one had come to help her. The warmth of her viscera had gone long-cold. She felt it as if it were something far, far away.

She was pretty sure she was dead. She just wasn’t sure why the pain hadn’t ended.

The woods were silent now. She had been in the woods before—the real world’s woods—and they had never seemed as quiet and as dark as they were in this place. The creature wasn’t here, and it hadn’t been for a long while--- days, maybe. Weeks. She’d been staring at the sky all that time, one more silent piece in the dark forest that didn’t make a sound.

The creature had been loud. She had known the sounds of its breathing, known what it was like as it knelt over her. She had known what those claws felt like against her flesh, and she had known what it was like when it _fed._

Something thick and slimy was making slow progress down her throat. She didn’t so much as twitch. The pain was still here, and the only thing left besides the dark and silent woods was the echo of terror that burned through her. She didn’t even remember her own name.

No one had come to save her. They hadn’t. They didn’t. They couldn’t.

So now she was here alone, and she was dead. Probably.

The creature had done something to her after tearing into her, after _eating_ her. After the screams had broken, hoarse and lost, she hadn’t been able to do anything but endure. The thing had dug deep into her, splitting her even more, sending hot blood (although less, now) spilling onto the ground. It had buried its flower-petal jaws into her flesh and she had felt it, felt _something_ , go in.

It had penetrated her. Filled her. Shock had told her a while ago that her entrails were in the wrong place, were _gone,_ and now the creature’s long claws were digging deeper as it pushed something _else_ farther inside her.

There was a thick sensation in her abdomen now, one of fullness. When the creature had finally left, the dirt and the forest floor had slowly covered her. Her skin had cooled, and she had waited for it to be over and to let oblivion take her. The spindly branches of the trees above her stood like witnesses, their ghostly fingers reaching.

The pain wasn’t fading, though. It was moving. It was creeping up, past her belly to her chest. It felt like a knife running along the underside of her ribcage, like how the neighborhood kids would rattle a stick against an iron-wrought fence. It was scraping her out from the inside.

She wondered what it was making room for.

It touched her spine. Every nerve in her body suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree, from her toes to her eyes, and she felt her body seize in the sudden shock of pain. The sound of her scream was trapped around the thick, viscous liquid in her throat.

The forest floor had pulled a cocoon over her of earth and web, and she shuddered inside it now. The spasm made her body sear and she writhed, tearing at the cocoon, shredding it. She flipped and wretched, casting something hot and vile into the dirt.

Her nails were longer, sharper, and it made it easier to tear out of the web and clumps of earth. The viscous shell tore apart in long strips under her fingers. When it was finally gone, when she was finally free of it, she threw herself to the base of one of the ghost trees and _breathed._

Her clothing was in tatters. They felt like the blanket of earth that had bound her. She kicked them away. The damp air was still the same, but it didn’t bother her even though her skin was bare, clammy.

Her breath no longer made puffs as it hissed out of her. Her glasses had clung to her face by one earpiece, and as she straightened herself they fell away. She didn’t notice.

Muscles bunched beneath her skin, tightening and stretching, and she used the base of the tree to claw her way up to standing. Whatever was inside her—whatever had torn through her nerves like tissue paper—was still setting off little spasms of agony. She screaped her fingernails against the bark of one of the trees—damned, silent witnesses to her changing—and relished in the way the bark scraped under her fingernails. It left behind old skin, false skin, weakness. The trees deserved the deep scratches she left. They had left her here and done nothing, just like everything else. She had been too weak to help herself.

But not anymore.

A hiss sounded in her chest, one that was born out of pain and ended up a snarl as her legs lengthened and thinned. Warm, rounded calves and thighs that had been streaked with blood and urine became sinewy and hard, mud and dew caking them now. It might have made her scream again if she hadn’t already endured so much more. Now it was a muted thrum in her head, dull in comparison to a new emotion.

The new emotion was like thick blood, hot and alive. It coated every fiber of her new muscle.

She scraped the tree again and then took a new, tentative step, finding her footing in the thick forest.

Her forest.


End file.
